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The Baltic people of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia gained recognition with their successful use of a cultural tool, singing folkloric songs, to protest collectively against their common Soviet oppressor in the summer of 1988, preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rational-choice theorists have argued that large rebellious movements are paradoxical because the larger the number of potential revolutionaries, the greater the leadership, participation, and coordination problems they face (Olson, 1971; Tullock, 1974). This paper investigates Estonia’s Singing Revolution and illustrates how ethnic Estonians used their shared cultural beliefs and singing traditions as a tacit, informal institutional solution to overcome the collective-action problems with organizing and participating in mass singing protests against the Soviet regime. The paper goes further to extend the standard rational-choice framework and to include a more dynamic, entrepreneurial-institutional perspective on socio-cultural change by accounting for the role of cultural leaders as cultural entrepreneurs, a subset of institutional entrepreneurs. The success of Estonia’s Singing Revolution can be ultimately attributed to leadership in the form of cultural entrepreneurship going back to pre-Soviet Estonian times. The revived legacy of ancient shared beliefs, folkloric practices, and singing tradition represented the necessary social capital for the Estonian people to voice collectively shared preferences for political and economic governance during a window of constitutional opportunity. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost, a policy aimed to improve Soviet formal institutions by fostering freedom of speech and political transparency, also provided a context propitious for the Singing Revolution because it lowered the perceived costs of participation in the rebellious singing and opened a window of opportunity for political change.

In a lot of 452 patients with various forms of tuberculosis, in various locations, the authors have investigated the efficiency of tests currently employed in detecting tuberculin sensitivity (intradermoreaction to PPD, the test to sensitines and the Ustvedt test), in relation with several immunologic tests performed in vitro (index of lymphoblastogenesis to PPD and/or phytohaemagglutinin, leucocyte migration inhibition test, and the rosette test). It was noted that the two groups of investigations give similar results when tuberculin reactions are positive and intense. Under the conventionally admitted threshold of tuberculinic allergy the test of blastic transformation of lymphocytes, and especially the leucocyte migration inhibition tests are still positive and may be considered as a valuable means for measuring infra-tuberculinic allergy, as well as for the diagnosis of latent tuberculous infections.

The authors have performed 58435 microscopic examinations, of which 3813 were positive, and found 209 (5,48%) cases of non-cultivable Koch bacilli. The major bacteriological, clinico-evolutive and therapeutical aspects are examined. Most of the cases showing a syndrome of positive homogenate with a negative culture were rather recent ones (an evolution of less than 2 years in 73,68% of the total) and the highest frequency was found in those in which the treatment was in its first year. No direct relationship could be demonstrated between the number of germs (the Gaffky scale) and the frequency of the syndrome. The factors influencing the occurrence and the development of the syndrome are: the structure of the lesions, the method of bacteriologic examination, the therapy applied, and a certain immunologic reactivity. According to the authors the significance of this syndrome is positive in most of the cases, indicating a regression that has not been completed. The most reasonable attitude is a differentiated one, depending on each case, integrating the data obtained by the bacteriological examination in the therapeutic and evolutive clinico-radiologic context.